


Precipice

by Serenhawk



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Consensual Non-Monogamy, First Kiss, First Meetings, M/M, Pining, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:21:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22190236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serenhawk/pseuds/Serenhawk
Summary: Misha knocks determinedly on Jensen's hotel room door.He's jetlagged. And wired. He may also have downed the entire bottle of vodka he plucked from the minibar as he left his own room.He doesn't know what will happen when the door opens. But he’s ready.
Relationships: Jensen Ackles/Danneel Harris, Jensen Ackles/Misha Collins, Misha Collins/Vicki Vantoch
Comments: 43
Kudos: 107
Collections: Cockles Advent Calendar Challenge





	Precipice

**Author's Note:**

> Some time ago my partner in crime and I wrote our version of the History of Cockles for the ill-fated Cockles Big Bang. Immediately afterward (just for fun) I began to muse on the hypothesis "what if we were wrong about everything"?  
> Not, of course, the reality of Jensen and Misha. But I was struck by the idea of inverting all our headcanons, which escalated to turning all the tropes and threads of speculation common in Cockles RPF and fandom group chats everywhere inside out. I then started a long alt-history fic with the challenge to myself of switching out their roles while still keeping JenMish in character.  
> That fic has languished on my unfinished pile for 3+ years, but I've had a specific scene I hadn't gotten to writing yet taking up space in my head. So, when I threw out my original prompt for this challenge, I thought I might exorcise that scene by putting it on the page and bend the challenge rules by calling it a quick 1500 word 'teaser' for the fic that will, in all probability, never be published. As a surprise to no one who knows me, it is now outrageously late and close to 6k. Ta-da!
> 
> Thanks to shellz for the beta. Any remaining typos are my own.
> 
> This is a work of fiction. No disrespect is intended to those whose names are used.

_Rap---rap-rap_

Misha feels like he's on a trapeze as he taps his knuckles on the door of room 923, light-headed and adrift, taunting gravity. His palms are sweaty from more than just the muggy English spring day.

He’s still a little jet-lagged but his thoughts are skittish, the jittery kind of wired he gets when he's overtired and overstimulated. He may also have downed the whole tiny bottle of vodka he plucked from the minibar as an afterthought when he left his room.  
He doesn't know what will happen when his knock is answered. But he’s ready.

+

They’ve played a game of cat and mouse for a while now. Months. Maybe from the moment they met nearly a year ago, when the number one on his call sheet for the day had cocked his head to one side and eyed him up, slowly, then down again to the almost audible beats of Misha’s pulse. Mouth dry, Misha had wet his lips and focused on the character he’d painted by numbers in his head, pushing out his lines before being wholeheartedly dismissed by that invasive woodland-green gaze.

What an asshole, Misha had thought after two days of working with him, writing Jensen Ackles off with a string of adjectives: _aloof, insensitive, cocky, mystifyingly intuitive, gallingly good-looking, childish…_  
That the expanding list was drawn from the shallows of his vocabulary should have clued him into just how much Ackles had thrown his composure. But while he’d regained it in the weeks following that first one on the Supernatural set, what had unfolded since was the most nonchalant and disconcerting seduction Misha had ever been subjected to, a circumstance which threw more than just his composure for a loop.

He’d never been very good at playing either part - seduced or seducer. Ironically, given his academic curiosity towards deciphering body language, Misha had mostly proved inept at reading signals of interest, and he had a long history of failing to master his own. And Jensen’s advances were so enigmatic, so erratic and mercurial, he had spent much of the shooting schedule in that first year bewildered and second-guessing himself.

At first, Misha suspected he was just the butt of some elaborate joke, either on Jensen’s or the universe’s part. The man was so all-American, so straight-boy-next-door that Misha tried to dismiss the staring, the small but earnestly delivered compliments, the pigtail-pulling pranks, the way Jensen would sometimes corner Misha like he was a wallflower sitting out the dance just waiting for some square-jawed hero to waltz up, lick his lips and make him blush right through every layer of his skin, as just him having some kind of chemical reaction that turned his brain into a twinkie whenever he had to be around Ackles.  
He was straight too, after all.  
Well...ish.

But the longer he let himself look, the more he began to see: watching Jensen work with insight and care, the conversations with himself going on under the cultivated surface, the easy, natural intimacy he had with his friends underneath a sometimes performative veneer, the way the various veils of humor and pretense Jensen otherwise hid behind would occasionally drop. Misha began to get an inkling something softer there, something fragmentary and patient. Something yearning.

“You wanna grab dinner sometime? Get to know each other a little?”

The invitation had come out of the blue just before the Christmas hiatus, leaving Misha stammering. “Uh sure, yeah...umm…”

“Pick you up tomorrow, around seven."

He’d nodded at the casual edict, but as soon as he’d gotten back to the hotel apartment he’d called his wife. “I think I just agreed to go on a date,” he’d blurted, adding “I can’t tell,” in a pitiful tone.

There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, before a curious “...with?”

“Oh, uh... Jensen? You know, the—”

“Oh!” Vicki had cut him off with a poorly reigned in chuckle. Then, “Well, this is an interesting turn of events. Are you quite sure?”

“No. No! I’m not sure. Help!”

“Did you agree because you want it to be a date?”

Misha whined again, then hurtled full speed at a decision. “I’m gonna back out. What if he has the wrong idea? _And_ he’s a co-worker...aren't there rules?”

She made another amused noise. “What if his wrong idea is the right idea?”

“Victoria, you’re not helping,” Misha objected, even as he absorbed the meaning of her query.

“Honey, you’ve talked about him enough. You’re enthralled. Even I can tell.”

“What?” he demanded, his voice cracking as it pitched into a higher register, adding peevishly, “Am not!”

“Go. See what happens,” she insisted calmly. “If it was a friendly overture, then you’ve made a friend. If it’s more, then have some fun. Or maybe even both. It’s been a while.”

‘You’ve somehow glossed over the fact that he has an obvious penis.”

“I’m not sure how that’s relevant,” she mused, and Misha had heard her smirk down the line. “Obvious, huh?”

“Are you saying my sexuality is irrelevant?” His fretting had turned decidedly grouchy, though it was a character flaw they were each aware of.

His wife had hummed patiently for a moment. “From where I sit, you’re invested in finding out one way or the other, and the only way to do that is to go,” she'd eventually advised, assertive in the judicious way Misha seldom failed to pay attention to.

Which is why, the following evening, he’d found himself sitting in a dimly lit corner of a restaurant in Gastown across from the entirely unprecedented sight of a nervous Jensen nursing a double bourbon while stumbling for conversation.

 _Shit, shit, shit,_ Misha had noted internally. _This is a date._

He’d covered up his own awkwardness by taking charge of the menu and ordering for both of them in some weird territorial gesture that threw caution to the wind and left them at the mercy of the three least ordered things from the kitchen. What arrived, whilst horrifying to the palate, ended up a great conversation point, the ice well and truly broken by their shared dining trauma.

They’d talked. And laughed. And to his astonishment discovered they had more in common than Misha had imagined in terms of formative experiences, how they saw the world, and also each other—including the miscalculated first impressions they mutually confessed with shame-twisted grins.

Sense of foreboding all but forgotten, Misha had begun to truly loosen up when, giggles subsiding, Jensen had squared his tipsy gaze at Misha and divulged, “Dee—Danneel, my girl—she and I have an arrangement.”

“Oh?” was all Misha managed before swallowing down a large gulp of his fourth drink, his stomach flip-flopping around the cloying sweetbreads,

“Not a ‘do what you want’ arrangement,” Jensen countered with actual air quotation marks, “but, you know, a ‘have some fun occasionally’ arrangement. Since we’re apart for weeks.”

Vicki’s words echoing in his head, Misha stubbornly clung to obtuseness. “And you’re telling me this because...?”

“Because I like you.”

“You like me?”

“Dude, I _like_ like you. C’mon, we’re not kids here.”

Misha thumbed at a drip on his glass while he netted his thoughts. “I’m married,” he objected crudely.

“Uh, yeah… and I read your wife’s book.”

“How did you—?” He looked up sharply just in time to see Jensen issue an eye-roll.

“Contrary to appearances, I do know the internet exists.”

“I’m not… I mean, I'm—” Misha mumbled, averting his eyes from the ones intently trained on him as he failed to assert his heterosexuality despite having vigorously dismissed the memories of boyhood fumbling and several decidedly more adult romps as natural experimentation long ago.

Jensen scoffed, his Texas accent stretching as he caught Misha's abandoned inference. “You sure about that, big guy?”

“Aren't you straight?” Misha objected, accelerating on his out of control nose dive, directly in the face of contradictory evidence.

This time Jensen simply shrugged, the corner of his mouth wryly tipping up. “Do you know the internet exists? I’m told if you Google me, I haven’t always been that careful.”

Misha’s bottom lip wavered at what still managed to feel like an ambush.

‘Shiiiit, sorry,” Jensen intervened, shifting in his seat. “Have I come on too strong? Sometimes I do that when I know what I want." Then he'd raised his eyes squarely back to Misha's. "Happens less often than you might be thinking about now.”

_What I want._   
_I’m WHAT HE WANTS._

“No-no,” Misha finally answered, stammering. “I just…I’m flattered, but I don’t know if I'm inter— um, if it’s wise.”

Why did he say that? He was the king of running full tilt at bad ideas. Often literally. Why choose now to deviate from the habit of a lifetime?

“Fuck wise,” Jensen exclaimed, ignoring what Misha had really meant but abandoned. Then he’d inhaled deep into his chest and leaned forward on the dark wooden table, pushing his drink ahead of him. “But you’re right, you have to work with me, and you already find that challenging enough,” he added dryly, even as his index finger folded out to drift across the top of Misha’s hand as it sat curled around his bourbon.

It was only a momentary touch before the fingertip snapped back into place and Jensen's friendly disposition along with it, but the trail it had taken burned coldly until long after they’d parted and Misha was back in his home away from home, staring quizzically at his reflection in the harsh, fluorescent light of the bathroom thinking little beyond _Well, Fuck._

What had followed for the rest of his sporadic visits to the chilly north was the distinct feeling he was prey in a game no one had told him the rules of. At times quiet and watchful, or even distant, Jensen would switch to effortless, insistent flirting that implied he already owned a piece of Misha’s ass. The whiplash involved was intense, which Misha was astute enough to conclude was maybe the exact point of the tactic, but not canny enough to immunize himself from the effects. The effects being, he’d realized one day as Jensen stared at him from his mark while the hair girl fussed at one lightly sun-speckled temple, that he was inexorably sinking, the bindings of an enchantment tightening the more he tried to detect them.

Furthermore, Jensen seemed to simultaneously enfold Misha into the small group he clearly considered friends - a snare Misha found just as captivating and inescapable as it was confusing. It was a heady high, feeling like part of an exclusive group, despite being unmistakably singled out.

Jensen never outright propositioned him again. Misha wasn’t waiting for it, per se, but at times he almost willed it, just to see what would come out of his own mouth when it happened. He might have recklessly taken it upon himself to expedite it if it wasn't for keenly feeling the sense of stasis he and Vicki had achieved after some turbulent times; there’d been talk of kids, and renovating again, and other wholesomely adult pursuits rubber-stamped by society at large, and he couldn’t quite see where a fling with a colleague would fit into that. Moreover, he’d been informed it likely that he’d be asked to return to the job the following fall. Angels were proving popular, it seemed, for which he was more grateful than he wanted to admit. Insane crush aside, he liked working there, despite the ribbings he received at the hands of his two sometimes claustrophobically close co-stars, and the travel, and the cold winter that had reminded him of what he didn’t miss about the east coast. But professionally he'd never enjoyed the environment, and the people, more. He almost felt like he belonged, a sensation he was generally unaccustomed to.

His wife had proved no help either way, simply giving silent endorsement with her liquid gaze whenever he wrung his hands over it, or even, somehow, when he pointedly ignored the unanswered question that hovered over him.

She’d stayed a neutral observer when they were both invited to a party one weekend at Jensen’s (and more recently Danneel’s) modestly palatial house in Los Angeles not long before the season wrapped. They’d been signed to travel together to Australia for a convention within a few weeks—partners included—and the suggestion was made that it would prudent to all meet and hang together before they were forced the spend over fourteen hours on a plane and a weekend on the other side of the world in close quarters.

Misha had not found it as awkward an occasion as he’d feared. The couple’s friends were an eclectic collection of mostly musicians and actors he was unfamiliar with, but the vibe was relaxed and the company engaging. Danneel had curled a beatific smile at him as he did his best not to stumble his way through their introduction, weighing him up and down in a way not unlike her boyfriend had, though perhaps for less plain reasons.

He’d been well on his way to being drunk when he encountered the host just off the first-floor landing on a mission to locate the bathroom. Drunk enough that he leaned a little too close and smiled a little too wide when Jensen turned to face him.

“Enjoying yourself?” his torturer had asked over the music carrying up the stairs, as bemused as he was himself tipsy.

“Early results seem to indicate...yes,” Misha replied with an odd flourish.

“Good,” Jensen said. “Dee likes you, you know.”

Misha preened a little. “Does that mean I have the stamp approval?”

Jensen’s eyebrows hiked. “That important to you?”

Suddenly aware they were heading down a dangerous path, Misha began to backpedal. “Only from the perspective that I would’ve thought it important to you. You know, hypothetically.”

Jensen took a deliberate step forward then, then another, and Misha had found himself inching back from the intrusion until he encountered the corner of an opposing doorway. “Hypothetically?” Jensen quizzed darkly.

Trying to arrange himself on a casual, flirty lean, Misha blundered on. “Hypothetically, as in if you were still interested in getting in my pants.”

A furrow appeared on Jensen’s forehead. “You can’t tell if I am?”

“Um—”

“That’s cute, by the way. I mean, I should be offended my game is apparently so weak,” he’d carried on, leaning towards Misha’s ear and whispering in that way the drunk do when they think they’re whispering but they are, in fact, not. “But it’s cute.”

Misha froze, caught between dropping the drawbridge of his reservations and _too soon_ , Jensen’s frame close and suddenly oppressive.

“What?” Jensen had asked cautiously, sensing his discomfort.

“This isn’t emasculating at all,” Misha replied, then wished he was able to take it back as Jensen’s face at first fell, then shifted to resigned.

“I think it best if we shelve this conversation, for now,” he’d murmured regretfully, then moved away to leave Misha to slump against the door jamb and kick himself.

Then had come Australia.

Fucking Australia.

Later, if Misha had to name a tipping point, that would be it. The juncture at what he’d labeled distracting but innoxious hot-then-cold flirting had fissured, revealing something more insistent underneath.

Maybe it had been due to both the girls being there, or because they were on the upside-down of the world, but Jensen had been quiet, and awkward, and... shy. Interview after interview they’d sat next to each other, Jensen knocking a knee against his, laughing softly but too hard at his jokes, a push-pull of seeking but maintaining distance. It had driven Misha crazy and it took him hours of tossing and turning next to Vicki on their return home to figure out why: that Jensen had somehow flipped their script and left Misha to occupy the space left, a space he seemed to subconsciously fill by manspreading and off-color commentary, and engaging in a battle for dominance with Jared that had begun with a competition to see who was more derisive and cocky, then evolved into an experiment to discern how obnoxious they could get away with being as a tag team. It had reached fruition during a panel where they’d engaged in a lewd demonstration onstage reminiscent of a certain sex act, the dark and disgusted looks they'd received signifying Jensen had reached some breaking point.

“What the fuck was that?” Jensen had demanded, having apparently bottled his grievance through endless autographs until they’d been transported back to the hotel. Misha had been ravenously hungry and low on tolerance, unlike their patient partners who’d had taken some time out to explore the shopping. When Misha had answered the door Jensen had not wasted any time marching inside before turning on him.

No smart-ass comment presented on the back of Misha’s tongue at the incursion. After struggling for a few seconds he’d given up on finding any words at all in favor of watching the murderous expression on Jensen’s flushed face dissipate until it was replaced with one much more defeated. It was fascinating, watching the tension leech away from Jensen’s eyes, the bolt of his jaw soften with a bobbing swallow. Misha had stood across from him hundreds of times by now, watching his colleague’s character shift between emotions—mostly with enviable ease—but he realized with a start that this was the first time he’d witnessed similar interplay in Jensen. Sure, he’d seen him amid determined and amused, pissy and contrite, but Misha had never seen him _wounded_.

However, he successfully squelched the natural apology that leaped to his tongue. “It was nothing,” he eventually answered, his tone careful.

“Nothing,” Jensen repeated, adding a scoff. Then his eyes dropped to the brushed carpet and he mumbled, “wish it had felt like nothing,” under his breath, almost but not quiet enough for Misha to miss.

“What did it feel like?” Misha asked, hushed, before he could stop himself. Jensen looked up, the air in the small room going from thin to charged as his eyes scoured Misha’s face for his answer.

A muted roll of distant thunder broached the silence, and Misha almost hoped for a bolt of lightning to strike him down and put him out of his misery. This kind of unresolved tension was supposed to be thrilling, not feel like you are about to be flayed alive. “Unexpected,” was the word the other man finally settled on.

Misha tried to drown a sudden, incongruous laugh.

“What?” Jensen demanded.

“I have no fucking idea,” Misha replied, honestly. The words that were coming out of their mouths bearing meager relation to whatever the fuck was really going on here. The smile that crept across his lips, however, was abruptly halted by Jensen crossing the three feet between them, stopping so close Misha felt the breath his colleague held in the top of his broad chest.

Frozen, gaze fixed on the lips inches from his own, Misha lifted his mouth and invited the kiss he’d outright feared for months. The kiss he received was not the one he’d never admit to imagining sometimes when his mind drifted. So tentative, so austere, it nearly wasn’t a kiss at all. In fact, if his heart wasn’t thudding up into his throat, Misha may have likened it sooner to the first kiss he’d shared with Vicki, when they were not even legal and so careful with each other out of inexperience rather than respect.

It wasn’t until Misha opened his eyes to find Jensen’s searching his that he realized their mouths had parted, a surprised, timid smile playing at the corner of the mouth of the man with whom Misha still shared air—or would, if only he could jump-start his lungs.

“How did that feel?” Jensen murmured, low and edged with wonder.

Misha had blinked and replied with the truth. “Unexpected.”

Jensen had left as briskly as he’d arrived with an excuse of needing to shower and change for dinner, and although Misha expected a customary text suggesting a time and location to all eat together, one never arrived. Furthermore, after their flight home, Misha didn’t hear from Jensen at all, only meeting again six weeks later en route to another convention in the UK. Misha had let the silence slide, trying to make sense of what had happened, and what he might want to happen. “So, we kind of kissed,” he’d told his wife once they’d been home a week. It wasn’t that he was reluctant to tell her. He’d just been loath to hear himself say it aloud, the words casting the event solidly into his personal history where he could no longer entertain the idea he’d imagined it.

“And?” she'd prompted, casting him a mixed look of curiosity and pride.

“Fucked if I know,” he'd replied with a grimace meant to both portray and dismiss every mixed-up and indiscernible feeling he had on the matter simultaneously.

What’s more, he’d told himself that he didn’t need to know. That if this was just an eccentric seduction preceding the worst one-night stand in history, then so be it. If it was an elaborate joke, then what-the-fuck-ever. He’d told himself over and over it didn’t signify anything even as he remembered the delicate cushion of Jensen’s lips pressed to his, the woosh down his spine of something not terrifying, nor electrifying, but rather something unalloyed.

By the time they settled into the work in Birmingham, Misha was an anxious ball of unwelcome craving and questions. They'd barely interacted beyond Hello and didn’t get any time alone, the first two days a whirlwind of disorganization, jetlag, and face after bright, open face vying for his attention. But the few times they were in proximity and they brushed past each other, or their fingertips grazed around a passed pen or bottle neck, it was like dipping his hand into liquid nitrogen.

Then on the last afternoon, intently watching Jensen from across the green room throwing his head back with laughter alongside his burly friend Jason, it landed on Misha like a dropped piano: he was miserably and irretrievably infatuated.

So wretched with it was he, so haunted by the ghost of the kiss and the cavern of what-ifs it had unlocked, that he decided the quickest and easiest way to get over it was to force Jensen’s hand. Whatever the outcome, he was not built to sustain this tension for long. It just wasn’t in his nature to stand on an escarpment just for the view of his choices.

He needed to jump.

+

As the evening rolled around, Misha felt like he’d been talking in innuendo all weekend. He's really gotta tone down the ribald allusions in front of the fans, he thought, or else this convention gig won’t last long. But when he’s nervous and uptight apparently a weird performative testosterone cocktail kicks in and all sorts of bullshit just falls out of his mouth.

Their company has all been out to dinner, so there's already a not insubstantial amount of wine consumed before he’d raided his minibar for Dutch—or was that Russian—courage. Now, waiting for the door to open, his somewhat sluggish synapses scramble for what to say. He hadn’t sent a text or otherwise given any hint of his intention. At the restaurant, he’d purposely sat at the opposite end and out of Jensen’s eye-line to try and eliminate as much of the hot, scratchy feeling he had when they were in the same room, and hoped no one noticed the occasional moon eyes he cast down the long table.

Maybe he’s not even in, Misha begins to wonder, staring at the peephole nestled in the dark veneer. Maybe he already has company, the thought bringing him to the brink of scurrying back to his room four doors down. But then there’s a click and the door swings open.

“Hey,” Jensen says, pulling the door as wide as his smile, allowing Misha to enter without preamble. Misha tells himself he’s not special, Jensen is just naturally affable, but even the most cynical corner of his brain notices the flash of satisfaction that passes over the occupant’s perfectly formed features.

Misha strides into the short corridor, past the bathroom and spins at the edge of the room.  
“What’s happening?” Jensen adds genially before Misha can issue a greeting of his own. He spares a second to take in the bland, generic space: double queen beds, a couple of uncomfortable-looking tub chairs littered with Jensen’s things, carelessly discarded, then Jensen himself: feet bare, free of his watch, stripped to his dark grey tee which hangs loose apart from a small patch of hem tucked on one hip.

“Sorry, you just going to bed?” Misha checks, mildly stricken.

Jensen walks past and collects a glass tumbler from the bureau. “Just winding down. Want one?” he asks, holding it up, the amber liquid catching the light.

“Sure.”

Ice clinking, Jensen pours from a near-empty bottle and hands over the glass, then collects his own and knocks it gently against Misha’s before he has a chance to take a sip.

“What are we drinking to?” Misha inquires.

“I dunno. The Queen or something?” Jensen shrugs, and they both take a swig, the whiskey scouring a warm trail down Misha’s throat.

Then Jensen moves to the bed nearest the window and unceremoniously flops down to recline against the mountain of pillows, gesturing for Misha to take the other as he pulls up one knee. Misha doesn’t, deciding to stay marooned in the center of the room. He cradles his drink and makes thumbprints in the condensation while attempting to keep his mind off how clumsy he feels. When he risks a look back up, Jensen’s face is wolfish.

“Mish, your nerves are making me nervous,” he says, and Misha takes another swallow. Jensen tips his head and confidently observes, “You didn’t just stop by for a chat, did you.”

Misha huffs wryly as a flush creeps under his collar. “Talking wasn’t on my mind, no.”

Jensen’s mouth smiles around the rim of his glass, then sips. “Did you come to seduce me?” he asks, lips glistening, and Misha can’t pull his eyes away from them.

Blushing deeper, he exclaims, “if I was trying to seduce you, you’d know it,” the internal groan that follows echoing inside his head, because bravado never looked good on him so why the ever-loving fuck did he say that.

Eyebrows climbing, Jensen does him a favor and ignores it. “You were hoping I’d seduce _you_ ,” he deduces.

“I don’t know,” Misha answers slowly. “I did mention that I didn’t imagine any talking, didn’t I?”

“Interesting,” Jensen croons. He drains his drink and swings his legs around to sit, placing his glass on the wide bedside. Then he simply looks, gaze sweeping inch by aching inch from Misha’s feet to the blush which he assumes must have reached the tips of hair by now. “Christ, you really are wound tight, aren’t you,” he relents finally, standing and crossing to take Misha’s drink from him and set it down. Then he returns, toes meeting, though with Misha still in his shoes they're almost exactly the same height.

Jensen lifts his hands to make a show of fixing the collar of Misha’s button-down, then slides his fingertips down the length of the placket. “Why do you wear shirts a size too big?” he asks curiously, then unsheathes the lowest button. “I thought it was just random ones, but now I want to toss your whole wardrobe.”

Misha frowns, the statement distracting him just enough that his breath thaws. “You want to be responsible for dressing me?” he quizzes softly as another button unhooks.

“I’d rather be responsible for undressing you, but alright,” Jensen replies with a voice not nearly as smooth as his words, and Misha feels some small relief from knowing he’s not the only one affected here. Then, magically, all the buttons are free and his shirt is being lightly shed from his shoulders and slipped from his arms.

Misha forgets how to breathe again as palms ghost over where his tee covers his ribs, thumbs pausing to circle his nipples before continuing upwards to his neck. Maybe it’s the alcohol or maybe Jensen is just too close, but he can’t focus on one thing, his eyes fixing on the light shearing off a cheekbone, the scant lines in his lips, the freckles scattered on his nose and the curved scar near the cleft on his chin. He expects to be kissed again, properly this time, but as Jensen’s mouth closes in and Misha shuts his eyes the kiss never arrives, or at least, not where he was expecting as lips press at the hinge of his jaw, then under his ear.

Seldom passive, and despite every voice inside clamoring _foolishstupidwrong_ Misha wills himself to let Jensen set the pace at leading them astray. Unbridling his senses, he gives over to the shiver that Jensen’s teeth passing over the shell of his ear elicits, the jolt in his pelvis at hands slide from his collar bone to his hips, rucking up his hem and grazing skin.

“Hmm,” Jensen hums musically as Misha’s tries to find purchase on his left hip to cinch them closer. “This what you had in mind?” he mumbles as he drifts lips along Misha’s line of stubble towards his mouth, and yet still no kiss comes.

Fingertips trace the rise of his waist to his back and venture up his spine, shirt hitching higher, then suddenly nails scratch over his nipples and his eyes fly open in surprise, looking up to see one brow arching in satisfaction. Misha parts his lips to say something, anything, but Jensen simultaneously pinches hard at one nipple while ducking his nose to nip the neglected side of Misha’s jaw, finding Misha’s mouth with his other thumb and pressing the tip inside as he does. It’s a trifecta of minor but targeted assaults and Misha’s knees all but buckle, both hands clasping now at Jensen’s back, the meat of his ass, the band of his jeans - anything to stop falling and launch them together.

Then Jensen pulls back, bottom lip pinched by his teeth as he smears Misha’s to one side and regards him with hooded eyes, considering, while Misha attempts to steady himself. He’s trying to access the skin at Jensen’s waist when he hears a soft “turn around.”

“What?”

Jensen places palms at his hips again to spin him on the spot, until he’s brought face to face with himself in the mirrored wardrobe door. Misha tenses at the sight, hair mussed, shirt askew with the half-mast erection in his jeans on prominent display. "Jen—" he begins to protest his discomfort.

"Shh-shh," Jensen interrupts gently, hooking his chin over Misha’s shoulder. "You didn't want to talk, remember?"

Shearing fingertips under Misha’s hem, Jensen massages gentle circles into the skin he finds there then dives them sharply to tease behind the button of Misha’s jeans. Letting his eyelids flutter shut for a moment, he gives over to Jensen’s hands, the caresses everywhere: sweeping arcs over his stomach, languidly cupping his crotch, thumbing the notches near the base of his spine as slow breaths are dragged over Misha’s neck. Jensen nuzzles behind his right ear, kissless presses leaving shivers along his neck, but he still starts when he hears the buckle on his belt loosen. Eyes flying open, Misha stares as steady fingers dismantle his fly and breech his underwear, then lifts his gaze to meet Jensen’s piercing one as he finds Misha’s dick and frees it from its already inadequate confines.

Misha fails to stifle a whimper as Jensen encases him in a loose grip and begins to stroke, languid tugs that push down at the elastic of Misha’s underwear with his knuckles. Crowding Misha’s ass with his pelvis, his eyes leave his task and find Misha’s darkened ones in the mirror again to hold them there, gradually working Misha harder and supporting him as he sways on his feet. His wide fingers were so much softer than Misha would have ever guessed but still on the edge of painful, dry and needy as he is, but it doesn’t matter, Jensen is still effortlessly dismantling him, stripping Misha down to a ragged, amorphous mess as he gazes at the picture their reflections make. Then Jensen pauses, plucking a bead of precum oozing from Misha’s swollen tip and brings it to his mouth, licking it from his middle finger with a pink tip of tongue Misha desperately wants to feel in place of Jensen's deft fingers.

This time Misha does moan, knees near buckling at the surge of arousal coursing through his lower body. He lets his head drop back experimentally on Jensen’s shoulder, his hips bucking into the hand that resumes attending him... except that it doesn’t.

 _No. No-no-no!_ Misha’s brain shrieks as the sluggish realization makes its way from his dick to his brain that he’s actually being tucked away and his shirt rectified.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he gasps as the man behind him takes a lazy half-step backward. He spins and turns his incredulous face on his colleague’s smug one. The elastic from his underwear grabs at his painfully sensitized cockhead and he groans at the now full understanding that yes, Jensen is going to leave him—them, because yes his eyes drop long enough to see Jensen’s jeans bulging obscenely to the left—like this.

Jensen’s plump smile grows to match Misha’s scowl, and Misha drops his chin to his chest to mumble, “I think I might actually hate you.”

Snickering, Jensen leans in to place a kiss at Misha’s temple. “No, you actually don’t,” he murmurs into Misha’s hair. “But you’re not ready.”

Desire souring in the pit of his stomach, Misha lurches away from the closeness, frustration a sudden geyser. “So that’s it? I’m just a snack that you want to play with first?”

A shadow crosses Jensen’s face for the first time, then it’s gone again just as fast as it arrives. “Don’t sell yourself short, Mish,” he says, flicking a look to Misha’s still unzipped fly. “You’re more than a snack.”

“You know what? Fuck you,” Misha replies, though it comes out more deflated than he intends.

“I wish,” Jensen returns the volley, but it is wistful and quiet; a silent, deadly missile that nearly knocks Misha off his feet followed by a blast wave of insecurities and doubt.

The man is right, he’s not ready.

Misha watches as Jensen purses his lips, then sighs. “I thought your mandate was harmless fun?” he points out, finally righting his jeans and fitting the button and belt home. “This doesn’t fulfill my idea of fun.”

He looks up just as Jensen glides into his space again. “I dunno, that was pretty fun for me,” he croons, and Misha is torn between wanting to step back and throw a punch, and kissing him. He decides on the latter, tipping forward with his mouth. Jensen almost lets him, only to duck his lips out of the way at the last second so that Misha’s connect somewhere to the side of Jensen’s nose.

“You’re infuriating,” Misha whispers vehemently, feeling Jensen’s smile against his cheek.

Jensen shrugs and leans back. “It’s been said,” he offers, in lieu of an apology.

This time it’s Misha’s turn to sigh. “I should go,” he decides, acting on the resolution by lurching away and making for the door, though he can sense Jensen’s footfall close behind. He catches Misha as he reaches for the handle, blocking him from opening it.

He waits, and Misha forces himself to meet his eyes. “Maybe I’m not ready either,” Jensen confesses, candidly acknowledging Misha’s distress, his own pulling down the corner of his mouth.

Misha narrows his look. “How so?” he asks, genuinely puzzled.

Jensen chews his lower lip for a interminable moment. “Because I’m not sure anymore about the harmless part,” he answers, then turns the handle, offering a weak smile which haunts Misha as he hears the door click shut behind him, as he falls into a restless sleep, and during the long flights home to the relative predictability and refuge of his wife.


End file.
